Coastal Security Swat Teams Set

Unit For Portsmouth To Deploy In August

June 14, 2002|By MICHAEL FABEY Daily Press

"Dirty" radioactive bombs hidden in ship containers. Terrorist divers sneaking up on a bridge or ocean liner. Hostages taken on the high seas.

These are the growing concerns of the U.S. Coast Guard. And the country's maritime sentinels are developing new elite SWAT teams -- called Marine Safety and Security Teams -- to deal with terrorist threats.

The first four teams start duty this summer in Portsmouth, Seattle, Long Beach, Calif., and Houston. The Coast Guard expects to deploy two more teams next year and as many as six more in 2004.

Seattle gets the first SWAT team July 3, while the second is scheduled to start in Portsmouth Aug. 1. The remaining teams are slated to start Sept. 1.

Each team will run 30-foot boats -- with top speeds of 40-plus knots -- that are designed to be quickly placed on trailers and flown by military C-130s to other ports, where suspicious ships can be intercepted before they reach inner waters.

"If you have a vessel with a suspicious cargo -- with chemical or nuclear or biological materials onboard -- you don't want to bring it to port and open it up there."

He said the teams would be deployed to potential trouble spots based on intelligence information. Coast Guard intelligence workers will check the cargo, passenger and crew lists of the 10,000 vessels that make U.S. port calls each year. If the intelligence officers find something suspicious enough, a security team will fly in.

The teams will be equipped with bomb-sniffing dogs. The dogs, along with their handlers, will be flown by helicopter to ships at sea, and will be lowered by cable to check for explosives.

The teams have been run through their paces for the past several weeks by Coast Guard trainers stationed at Camp Lejeune, a Marine Corps base in North Carolina. They have been live-firing M-16s, as well as training with nonlethal grenades and nonlethal rounds fired from shotguns, McPherson said.

The Coast Guard is responsible for security at 361 U.S. ports, as well as the country's 95,000 miles of coastline. The Coast Guard already has some port security teams, but those are primarily made up of reserves who, when they are called up, are sent to guard port facilities overseas, McPherson said.

"This is going to be the opposite," he said. "We're going to take the term 'guarding the coast' literally now."

Last weekend, the Coast Guard contacted port officials nationwide to warn of possible attacks from scuba divers equipped with explosives. The FBI had issued a similar warning May 23.

FBI agents continue to interview owners of dive shops nationwide. The agency is trying to determine whether al-Qaida operatives have been taking scuba training in order to blow up ships at anchor, as well as power plants, bridges, depots or other waterfront targets.

Steven Bronson, a Hampton Roads-based maritime counter terrorist expert who trains Coast Guard, police and other law enforcement officers, said the FBI had already questioned him about terrorist diver concerns.

"They went to every scuba store around here," Bronson said. "They want to know about anyone who's been trained over the past three years."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Michael Fabey can be reached at 247-4965 or by e-mail at mfabey@dailypress.com